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Full-Text Articles in East Asian Languages and Societies
On Literary Theory: Its Way Of Unveiling, Semiotic Rectangle And Absolute Deterritorialization, Jin Zhang
On Literary Theory: Its Way Of Unveiling, Semiotic Rectangle And Absolute Deterritorialization, Jin Zhang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In the 21st century, literary study has started a self-reflection on the multiple facets of theory, thus giving rise to anti-theories, meta-theories and after-theories, all of which cast doubt on theoretical study and literary theory. However, all the facets of theory are the inherent dimensions of theory per se. The exploration of the unveiling way of theory lies in a comprehensive view and an unveiling of theory itself. The theoretical rectangle reveals the varied and interconnected connotations within theory per se. The absolute deterritorialization of theory offers a dialectical possibility among territorization, deterritorization and reterritorization. The after theory is a …
Mirror Image Deviation In Cross-Cultural Transmission: A Reevaluation Of The Debate On H. D. Thoreau As A Hermit Or A Fake Hermit In Dushu, Luechang Liu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In the dissemination of H. D. Thoreau in China over the past 90 years, one heated debate with Dushu as the main platform occurred over Thoreau as a hermit or a fake one. By nature, this debate is a false statement, because Thoreau has never claimed to be a hermit. Being similar to the hermit and Chinese yinyi culture, a visible tendency to detach oneself from society and live in seclusion, Thoreau is arbitrarily judged as a hermit or a fake one. From the perspective of Chinese yinyi culture, some Chinese scholars analyzed the period, place, motivation and lifestyle of …
A Feminine Gaze: A Lacanian Analysis Of The Tv Series Journey To The West, Guanjun Wu
A Feminine Gaze: A Lacanian Analysis Of The Tv Series Journey To The West, Guanjun Wu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The TV series Journey to the West, first shown on China Central Television in 1986, is undoubtedly a seminal work in the history of Chinese television. As a TV remake of the classical Chinese novel bearing the same title, this work, following the principle of "faithfulness", substantively makes itself a symptomatic excess to the original novel. Through the "feminine affection" depicted by the general director Yang Jie, the original novel's phallocentric perspective is replaced in a revolutionary way by a feminine perspective of the Queen of the "Feminine Kingdom". In the end of the TV remake when Tripitaka has "completed" …
Behavior Language, Unconscious Structure And Literary Activities, Dakang Ma
Behavior Language, Unconscious Structure And Literary Activities, Dakang Ma
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Human's consciousness is constructed by the memory of speech acts, and the unconscious is constructed by the memory of behavior language. The similarities and differences between the two languages (behaviors) determine the relation and differentiation between the structure of consciousness and that of the unconscious. Therefore, it does not hold water that Lacan uses the structure of language to explain the unconscious. Aesthetic activities are the full cooperation between consciousness and the unconscious, so the characteristics of the two kinds of behaviors (languages) determine the dual character of aesthetic and artistic activities.
The Debate On "National Characteristic" And The Mindset Of Binary Opposition In Contemporary Intelligentsia, Yugao He
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In the debate on Lu Xun's "national characteristic" at the turn of the 20th century, Feng Jicai and Liu Hewereseverely criticizedfor their post-colonial stance. However, all these critics misunderstood Liu He's point. Through analysis, one finds that critics' mindset of binary opposition such as "China/west, tradition/modernity" was the main cause of the misreading. Meanwhile, Liu He's post-colonial practice also betrays dogmatic binary thinking. The mindset of binary oppositions inherent inmodern Chinese academic thought throughout history has restrained intellectuals' talent, hence a waste of intelligence. To avoid such mindset, Chinese literary scholars should be more sensitive and receptive tofindings in other …
A Critique Of The Three Approaches To Studying Liang Qichao's Aesthetic Thoughts, Xianwu Mo
A Critique Of The Three Approaches To Studying Liang Qichao's Aesthetic Thoughts, Xianwu Mo
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
There are three academic approaches to Liang Qichao's aesthetic thoughts: political criticism of Cai Shangsi around 1949, enlightenment criticism of Li Zehou in the new period, and aesthetic criticism of Jin Ya in this century. In spite of their varying attitudes towards politics, they all endorse the division of politics and aesthetics. The difference is that political criticism sees aesthetics attached to politics, enlightenment criticism distances aesthetics from politics, and aesthetic criticism sets aesthetics against politics. In fact, the relationship between politics and aesthetics is not merely one of separation or antithesis, but also one of consistency in terms of …
Imagining And Constructing "Popular Literature": The Popularization Of Literature And Art In China Since The "May Fourth" Movement, Zhiping Zhang
Imagining And Constructing "Popular Literature": The Popularization Of Literature And Art In China Since The "May Fourth" Movement, Zhiping Zhang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Since the May Fourth Movement, enlightenment became the basic strategy and approach by which the literary and art circle participated in politics; thus the movement of the popularization of literature and art was a by-product of this enlightenment strategy. The purpose for the movement of the "popularization of literature and art" was to construct "popular literature" that appealed to both the more and the less cultured, a modern genre in accordance with the new vision of literature. The road map of "popular literature" imagined and designed by the literary and art circle comprised three steps: 1. writers devoted to popularizing …
Statistical Literary Theory: New Literary Research Paradigm In The Era Of Big Data, Caishu Zhou
Statistical Literary Theory: New Literary Research Paradigm In The Era Of Big Data, Caishu Zhou
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The advent of the Big Data era highlights the importance of statistical methods. Franco Moretti and Stanford Literary Lab try to use some quantitative methods in literary researches. Their qualitative analysis on the data from books discovers some facts about literature that may challenge some established literary theories, and scholars are also trying to adopt the statistical methods to literary study in China. Statistical literary theory is literary research methodology with mathematical logic and empirical data, which comprises such methods as quantitative analysis, regression analysis, hypothesis test, and time series analysis. In term of its combination of aesthetics characteristics with …
Consumption Of Celebrity And The Republican Apparatus: Lu Xiaoman, Xu Zhimo And Tabloids In Late 1920s Shanghai, Jianhua Chen
Consumption Of Celebrity And The Republican Apparatus: Lu Xiaoman, Xu Zhimo And Tabloids In Late 1920s Shanghai, Jianhua Chen
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In late 1920s Shanghai tabloids flourished. With sensational news reports and literary narratives, they catered to urban readers' needs for daily emotional and cultural consumption. Due to their involvement in the Yunshang Company and theatre performances, Lu Xiaoman and Xu Zhimo became foci of Pictorial Shanghai and other major tabloids. Numerous news or rumors about their activities revealed different values, tastes, and commercial strategies among the tabloids, which told the game rules, ethics, and cultural politics of various communities and strata in the civil society. To a certain extent, the tabloids not only helped the masses know more about power …
Lu Xun's Idea Of Fiction Writing And His Brief History Of Chinese Fiction, Qingxin Wen
Lu Xun's Idea Of Fiction Writing And His Brief History Of Chinese Fiction, Qingxin Wen
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Lu Xun's idea of fiction writing was deeply influenced by his conceptualization of the book A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. Lu Xun initially read fictions as a historical phenomenon while currying the ancient Chinese fictional writings, and his lectures on the topic showed that he intended to take the perspective of nationalist critique. These showed that Lu Xun's guiding idea for writing the history of Chinese fiction was the cultivation of integrate men. The literary idea of "writing for life" (as contrary to "writing for art") was reflected in Lu Xun's own fictional writings, and the idea behind the …
Literature Ecology In The 1980s And The Publication Of Anthologies, Yong Xu
Literature Ecology In The 1980s And The Publication Of Anthologies, Yong Xu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
This paper explores the dialectical relationship between the publication of anthologies and the literature ecology in the 1980s. Anthology publication is linked to editors, writers and readers, and reflects literary environment of a particular era. The significance of anthology publication to literature ecology in the 1980s lies in two aspects, the first being the reflectivity and reactions almost all the literary periods and the second being the construction of the anthologies to literature ecology in the 1980s. The roles of various anthologies such as annual literary anthology, anthologies of controversial works, and anthologies of different literary schools present different ways …
On Narrative Of Literary Folklore, Dongwei Mei
On Narrative Of Literary Folklore, Dongwei Mei
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
As an interdisciplinary study of folklore and narratology, folk narrative is an indispensible component in the construction of Chinese narratology and an important dimension in the study of literary folkloristics. However, due to the ambiguity of the term and the lack of consensus of its academic parlance, "folklore narrative" has incurred much inconvenience to relevant studies. From the perspective of literary folkloristics, when the folk culture as a phenomenon in narratological text of fictions is to be defined, it is more appropriate to replace folklore narrative with the narrative of literary folklore. Narrative of literary folklore focuses on the narrative …
Toward The Future: A New Interpretation To Liang Qichao'sThe Future Of New China, Liyuan Jia
Toward The Future: A New Interpretation To Liang Qichao'sThe Future Of New China, Liyuan Jia
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Through a close reading of The Future of New China by Liang Qichao's (1873-1929), an important novel published in 1902, the paper analyzes the way Liang narrates time, which is revealed in the dialogue relationship between the text and its annotations. It argues that the novel is neither a pure narration of the future, nor a mere review of the present, but a constant movement between the two. This fundamental narrative feature of the novel explains why the author made many mistakes, unnoticed in existing scholarship, when dealing with the conversion between the Gregorian calendar and the Chinese calendar, as …
The Inheritance Of Misty Poetry's Tradition And The Crisis Of New Poetry, Guoyuan Xu
The Inheritance Of Misty Poetry's Tradition And The Crisis Of New Poetry, Guoyuan Xu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The paper aims to analyze how the Misty Poetry inherited Chinese poetry tradition and how the inheritance resulted in the spiritual crisis and the entailing crisis of Chinese contemporary poetry. The Misty Poetry tries to conceal its inheritance of Chinese modern poetry with an explicit anti-traditional gesture, but due to the unbridgeable gap between the poets' self and the cultural and historical tradition, the Misty poets could not but fall into the deep trap of nihilism. The essential influence on the Misty Poetry has been the early Western modernism, especially the Symbolism, and the Misty Poetry could hardly be said …
Literary Mind And The Carving Of DragonsAnd The Study On Texts In The Ming Dynasty, Jianzhong Bai
Literary Mind And The Carving Of DragonsAnd The Study On Texts In The Ming Dynasty, Jianzhong Bai
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The study of Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons emerged in the Ming Dynasty for many reasons, among which the Six-Dynasty School's attention to the work was an important factor. The influence of Literary Mind was so great in the Ming-Dynasty study on texts that the first monograph on text study A General Survey of Literary Texts (Wen Tong) was written in the style of Literary Mind in late Ming Dynasty. Some of the influential and important concepts in Wen Tong were either inherited from or developed upon Literary Mind, which showed that the Ming-Dynasty scholars could both inherit …
The Cultural Nature Of Material Objects And The Return Route Of Material Culture, Liang Xu
The Cultural Nature Of Material Objects And The Return Route Of Material Culture, Liang Xu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Material object is a sign which exists in the system of meaning discrimination and expression, and it is a concept in culture. Material objects in consumer society show the features of a system that is dominated by cultural ideas with the human sense of orientation. The development of material culture in consumer society necessitates the insatiable pursuit of material objects, because the prospect of material objects comprises the man-material relationship in consumer society and the foothold of consumer society falls on material. As the pursuit is based on the substantiality of material and it tries to avoid the certainty of …
The Cultural Political Significance Of Form: On The Musical Practices Of The New Worker's Art Troupe, Chunlin Guo
The Cultural Political Significance Of Form: On The Musical Practices Of The New Worker's Art Troupe, Chunlin Guo
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The paper examines the musical practice of the New Worker's Art Troupe from the perspective of cultural study, and focuses on the cultural political significance of forms in their practice. As a new kind of organization, the New Worker's Art Troupe purposely keeps a defiant posture to distance itself from cultural industry. They showcase many popular music works to the grass roots free of charge and their music works are usually imbued with keen sense of reality, adopting folk song's melodies and singing in dialects, and the paper observes that their musical practice is realizing the concept of "people's literature …
The Encounter Between François Cheng And Contemporary French Poetry, Chunfeng Wu
The Encounter Between François Cheng And Contemporary French Poetry, Chunfeng Wu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
François Cheng is the first person of Chinese origin elected to the French Academy. He has authored creative writings of poetry and fiction, with both Chinese Daoist philosophical wisdom and Western logical reasoning. This paperattempts to adopt a synchronic perspective and the thematic approach of criticism to explore how Cheng's poetry encounters contemporary French poetry so as to find out the common spirit behind the two cultures. The shared concept ofliterary writingbetween Cheng and the French poets is investigated from three aspects of the unknownness of the world, feeling and its subject, and the art of in-between writing so as …
An Exploration Into The Logics Of Language Construction During The May Fourth Period, Wei Deng
An Exploration Into The Logics Of Language Construction During The May Fourth Period, Wei Deng
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In his History of National Language Movement, Li Jinxi discussed the process of language construction in the May 4th period with a focus on the pronunciation while putting the vernacular movement into his narrative of the national language movement history. On the other hand, Hu Shi paid high attention to written language and tried to construct the national language with "vernacular literature," hoping to use "a literature of national language" to create "a national language of literature." Hu Shi's endeavor showed the general logic of language construction during the May Fourth period, that is, to construct a modern national language …
How Consumer Phenomenon Enters Literary Writing, Changzhong Wang
How Consumer Phenomenon Enters Literary Writing, Changzhong Wang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Representation of consumer culture is universal in literary writing and consumption has contributed an extensive content for literary works. When writing about consumer culture, literary production becomes an integral part of the culture. The paper argues that the consumption of literary writing implies an essentially literary discourse instead of consumer culture discourse. Literary writing about consumption shows distinctive characteristics of discursive presence: common and widespread capacity, localized and fragmented modality, and penetrative and interspersed mechanism. In view of the features such as the value, attributes, discursive features, it may be argued that the narrative strategies in literary writing about consumer …
On Auscultation, Xiuyan Fu
On Auscultation, Xiuyan Fu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The absence of auscultation, listening for precise judgement, in the perceptual experience entails the phenomenon of the employment of eyes for ears in the present "era of pictorial-reading." Listening has been entrusted with the power to resist the increasingly noisy self-talking in modern life. The earliest literary activity in mankind history is story-telling through listening, and due to the absence of auscultation, some important information only available to listening has been unrevealed from literary works. The paper argues that to re-read literary works from the perspective of listening facilitates to offset the perceptual imbalance caused by visual hegemony.
Qian Gurong In Literary Criticism From 1949 To 1966, Jianjun Xu
Qian Gurong In Literary Criticism From 1949 To 1966, Jianjun Xu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The first seventeen years from the establishment of P. R. China to the Cultural Revolution (1949 to 1966) is a special period for literary survival. In this period, the constraints and restraints of politics on literature co-exist with literature's rebellion against and escape from politics, which are intertwined with the dialogue and communication between the "integrated" literary norms and the heterogenic literary criticism. Under this historical context, Qian Gurong went through three important stages in his life, namely, the anxiety of political identity, the return to literary identity, and the adherence to "humanistic study." In each stage, Qian Gurong managed …
Wen Yiduo's Translation And The Formation Of Metrical Poetics, Liming Chen
Wen Yiduo's Translation And The Formation Of Metrical Poetics, Liming Chen
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Wen Yiduo translated English poems with different metrical forms, and consciously applied English metrical poetics in his poetry writing and the theoretical configuration of new Chinese poetry, as an attempt to resist the prevailing poetic trends during the May 4th New Poetry movement predominantly spoken vernacular in nature and to promote the modern Chinese poetics with contemporary metrics and prosody. Through an examination of Wen Yiduo's long neglected translation of Byron's "Isles of Greece," the paper demonstrates his metrical poetics was constructed in and by his practice of translation and creative writing. The paper argues that Wen's practice helped to …